Priority based flow control is part of a set of standards that have been targeted for employment in data center environments. The purpose of these standards is to enable lossless semantics for a subset of layer 2 flows carried on an Ethernet segment. Accordingly, a receiver can generate a media access control frame and send a PAUSE request to a sender when it predicts the potential for a buffer overflow. Upon receiving a PAUSE frame, the sender responds by stopping transmission of any new packets until the receiver is ready to accept them again. One such standard is IEEE 802.1Qbb PFC, which extends the basic PAUSE semantics to multiple traffic classes per Ethernet segment. This enables applications that require flow control to coexist on the same wire with applications that perform better without it. Specifically, the priority based flow control pause frame mechanism defines 8 priorities that can be set to a pause state individually and independently of the other priorities. In queue based pipeline network processors, where all priority queues are staged through a single multi-level pipeline, difficulties can arise when pausing one priority queue without pausing the entire pipeline.